Agency Contracts under Maximum-Entropy

Gutiérrez, Oscar ; Salas-Fumás, Vicente (Universidad de Zaragoza)

Resumen: This article proposes the application of the maximum-entropy principle (MEP) to agency contracting (where a principal hires an agent to make decisions on their behalf) in situations where the principal and agent only have partial knowledge on the probability distribution of the output conditioned on the agent’s actions. The paper characterizes the second-best agency contract from a maximum entropy distribution (MED) obtained from applying the MEP to the agency situation consistently with the information available. We show that, with the minimum shared information about the output distribution for the agency relationship to take place, the second-best compensation contract is (a monotone transformation of) an increasing affine function of output. With additional information on the output distribution, the second-best optimal contracts can be more complex. The second-best contracts obtained theoretically from the MEP cover many compensation schemes observed in real agency relationships.

Idioma: Inglés

DOI: 10.3390/e23080957

Año: 2021

Publicado en: ENTROPY 23, 8 (2021), e957 [17 pp.]
ISSN: 1099-4300

Factor impacto JCR: 2.738 (2021)

Categ. JCR: PHYSICS, MULTIDISCIPLINARY rank: 42 / 86 = 0.488 (2021) - Q2 - T2

Factor impacto CITESCORE: 4.4 - Physics and Astronomy (Q2)

Factor impacto SCIMAGO: 0.553 - Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Q2) - Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous) (Q2) - Information Systems (Q2)

Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MINECO-FEDER/ECO2017- 86305-C4-3-R

Tipo y forma: Artículo (Versión definitiva)

Área (Departamento): Área Organización de Empresas (Dpto. Direcc.Organiza.Empresas)